Marxism and the Present Task of the Proletarian Class Struggle

Let the dead bury their
dead.
The proletarian revolution must
at last arrive at its own content.

Marx

Of Karl Marx may be said what Geoffroy St. Hilaire said of
Darwin
that it was his fate and his glory to have had only forerunners before
him and only disciples after him. Of course, there stood at his side a
congenial life-long friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. There
were in the next generation the theoretical standard-bearers of the
"revisionist" and the "orthodox" wings of the German Marxist party,
Bernstein and Kautsky and, besides these pseudo-savants, such real
scholars of Marxism as Antonio Labriola the Italian, Georges Sorel in
France, and the Russian philosopher Plekhanov. There came at a later
stage an apparently full restoration of the long forgotten
revolutionary elements of the Marxian thought by Rosa Luxemburg in
Germany and by Lenin in Russia.

During the same period Marxism was embraced by millions of
workers
throughout the world as a guide for their practical action. There was
an imposing succession of organizations, from the secret Communist
League of 1848 and the Working Men's International Association of 1864
to the rise of powerful Social Democratic parties on a national scale
in all important European countries and to an ultimate coordination of
their scanty international activities in the so-called Second
International of the pre-war period which after its collapse found its
eventual resurrection in the shape of a militant Communist party on a
world-wide scale.

Yet there was, during all this time, no corresponding internal
growth of the Marxian theory itself beyond those powerful ideas which
had been contained within the first scheme of the new revolutionary
science as devised by Marx.

Very few Marxists up to the end of the nineteenth century did
so
much as find anything wrong with this state of affairs. Even when the
first attacks of the so-called revolutionists brought about what a
radical bourgeois socialist, the later first president of the
Czechoslovak republic, Th. G. Mazaryk, then called a philosophical and
scientific "crisis of Marxism," the Marxists regarded the condition
existing within their own camp as a mere struggle between an "orthodox"
Marxist faith and a deplorable "heresy." The ideological character of
this wholesale identification of an established doctrine with the
revolutionary struggle of the working class is further enhanced by the
fact that the leading representatives of the Marxian orthodoxy of the
time, including Kautsky in Germany and Lenin in Russia, persistently
denied the very possibility that a true revolutionary consciousness
could ever originate with the workers themselves. The revolutionary
political alms, according to them, had to be introduced into the
economic class struggle of the workers “from
without” i.e.
by the theoretical endeavors of radical bourgeois thinkers "equipped
with all the culture of the age, such as Lassalle, Marx, and Engels.
Thus, the identity of a bourgeois-bred doctrine with all present and
future truly revolutionary struggles of the proletarian class assumed
the character of a veritable miracle. Even those most radical Marxists
who came nearest to the recognition of a spontaneous development of the
proletarian class struggle beyond the restricted aim pursued by the
leading bureaucracies of the existing Social Democratic parties and
trade unions, never dreamt of denying this pre-established harmony
between the Marxist doctrine and the actual proletarian movement. As
Rosa Luxemburg said in 1903, and the Bolshevik Rjazanov repeated m
1928, "every new and higher stage of the proletarian class struggle can
borrow from the inexhaustible arsenal of the Marxist theory ever-new
weapons as needed by that new stage of the emancipatory fight of the
working class."

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the more
general
aspects of this peculiar theory of the Marxists concerning the origin
and development of their own revolutionary doctrine, a theory which in
the last analysis amounts to a denial of the possibility of an
independent proletarian class culture. We refer to it in our present
context only as one of the many contradictions to be swallowed by those
who in striking contrast to the critical and materialistic principle of
Marx dealt with "Marxism" as an essentially completed, and now
unchangeable, doctrine.

A further difficulty of this quasi-religious attitude towards
Marxism arises from the fact that the Marxian theory was never adopted
as a whole by any socialist group or party. "Orthodox" Marxism was at
no time more than a formal attitude by which the leading group of the
German Social Democratic party in the pre-war period concealed from
themselves the ever-continuing deterioration of their own formerly
revolutionary practice. It was only this difference of procedure which
separated what distinguished "orthodox" form from an openly
revisionistic form of adapting the traditional Marxist doctrine to the
new "needs" of the workers' movement arising from the changed
conditions of the new historical period.

When amidst the storm and stress of the revolutionary struggle
of
1917, in view of a "clearly maturing international proletarian
revolution," Lenin set himself the task to restate the Marxian theory
of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution, he no
longer contented himself with mere ideological defense of an assumedly
existing orthodox interpretation of the Marxist theory. He started from
the premise that revolutionary Marxism had been totally destroyed and
abandoned both by the opportunist minority and by the outspoken
social-chauvinist majority of all Marxist parties and trade unions of
the late Second International. He openly announced that Marxism was
dead and proclaimed an integral "restoration" of revolutionary Marxism.

There is no doubt that "revolutionary Marxism," as restored by
Lenin, has led the proletarian class to its first historical victory.
This fact must be emphasized not only against the pseudo-Marxist
detractors of the "barbarous" communism of the Bolsheviks-as against
the "refined" and "cultured" socialism of the West. It must be
emphasized also against the present beneficiaries of the revolutionary
victory of the Russian workers, who have gradually passed from the
revolutionary Marxism of the early years to a no longer communist but
merely "socialist" and democratic creed called Stalinism. In the same
way, on an international scale a mere "anti-fascist" coalition of the
united fronts, people's fronts, and national fronts was gradually
substituted for the revolutionary class struggle waged by the
proletariat against the whole economic and political regime of the
bourgeoisie of the democratic" as well as in the fascist, the
"pro-Russian" as well as the anti-Russian, states.

In the face of these later developments of Lenin's work, it is
no
longer possible to stick to the idea that the restored old
revolutionary principles of Marxism, which during the war and the
immediate post-war period had been advocated by Lenin and Trotsky,
resulted in a genuine revival of the revolutionary proletarian movement
which in the past had been associated with the name of Marx. For a
limited period it seemed, indeed, that the true spirit of revolutionary
Marxism had gone east. The striking contradictions soon appearing
within the policy of the ruling revolutionary party in Soviet Russia,
both on the economic and on the political fields, were considered as a
mere outcome of the sad fact that the "international proletarian
revolution" firmly expected by Lenin and Trotsky did not mature. Yet in
the light of later facts there is no doubt that ultimately, Soviet
Marxism as a revolutionary proletarian theory and practice has shared
the fate of that "orthodox" Marxism of the West from which it had
sprung and from which it had split only under the extraordinary
conditions of the war and the ensuing revolutionary outbreak in Russia.
When finally in 1933, by the unopposed victory of the
counterrevolutionary "national socialism," in the traditional center of
revolutionary international socialism, it became manifest that "Marxism
did not deliver the goods," that judgment applied to the Eastern
Communist as well as to the Western Social Democratic church of the
Marxist faith, and the separate factions were at last united in a
common defeat.

In order to make intelligible the true significance and the
far
reaching further implications of this most important lesson of the
recent history of Marxism, we must trace back the duplex character of
the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletarian class" which has
become widely conspicuous by recent events both within present-day
Stalinist Russia and on an international scale, to an original
duplicity appearing in the different aspects of Marx's own achievements
as a proletarian theorist and as a political leader in the
revolutionary movement of his time. On the one hand, as early as 1843,
he was in close contact with the most advanced manifestations of French
socialism and communism. With Engels he founded the Deutsche
Arbeiterbildungsverein in Brussels in 1847 and set about to found an
international organization of proletarian correspondence committees.
Soon afterwards, they both joined the first international organization
of the militant proletariat, the Bund der Kommunisten, at whose request
they wrote the famous "Manifesto" proclaiming the proletariat as "the
only revolutionary class."

On the other hand, Marx as an editor of the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung
during the actual revolutionary outbreak of 1848 expressed mainly the
most radical demands of the bourgeois democracy. He strove to maintain
a united front between the bourgeois revolutionary movement in Germany
and the more advanced forms in which a struggle for direct socialist
aims was at that time already waged in the more developed industrial
countries of the West. He wrote his most brilliant and powerful article
in defense of the Paris proletariat after its crushing defeat in June,
1848. But he did not bring forward in his paper the specific claims of
the German proletariat until a few weeks before its final suppression
by the victorious counterrevolution of 1849. Even then, he stated the
workers' case in a somewhat abstract manner by reproducing in the
columns of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung the economic lectures dealing
with Wage Labor and Capital which he had given two years before in the
Arbeiterbildungsverein at Brussels. Similarly, by his contributions in
the 1850's and 60's to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, to the New
American Cyclopaedia edited by George Ripley and Charles Dana, to
Chartist publications in England, and to German and Austrian
newspapers, Marx revealed himself chiefly as a spokesman of the radical
democratic policies which, he hoped, would ultimately lead to a war of
the democratic West against reactionary tsarist Russia.

An explanation of this apparent dualism is to be found in the
Jacobinic pattern of the revolutionary doctrine which Marx and Engels
had adopted before the February Revolution of 1848 and to which they
remained faithful, on the whole, even after the outcome of that
revolution had finally wrecked their former enthusiastic hopes.
Although they realized the necessity of adjusting tactics to changed
historical conditions, their own theory of revolution, even in its
latest and most advanced materialistic form, kept the peculiar
character of the transitory period during which the proletarian class
was still bound to proceed towards its own social emancipation by
passing through the intermediate stage of a preponderantly political
revolution.

It is true that the revolutionary political effects of the
economic
warfare of the trade unions and of the other forms of championing
immediate and specific labor interests became increasingly important
for Marx during his later years, as attested by his leading role in the
organization and direction of the International Working Men's
Association in the 60s and by his contributions to the programs and
tactics of the various national parties in the 70s. But it is also
true, and is clearly shown by the internecine battles waged within the
International by the Marxists against the followers of Proudhon and
Bakunin, that Marx and Engels never really abandoned their earlier
views on the decisive importance of politics as the only conscious and
fully developed form of revolutionary class action. There is only a
difference of languages between the cautious enrolment of "political
action" as a subordinate means to the ultimate goal of the "economic
emancipation of the working class" as contained in the Rules of the
IWMA of 1864, and the open proclamation, in the Communist Manifesto of
1848, that "every class struggle is a political struggle" and that the
"organization of the proletarians into a class" presupposes their
"organization into a political party." Thus, Marx, from the first to
the last, defined his concept of class in ultimately political terms
and, in fact though not in words, subordinated the multiple activities
exerted by the masses in their daily class struggle to the activities
exerted on their behalf by their political leaders.

This appears even mere distinctly in those rare and
extraordinary
situations in which Marx and Engels during their later years again were
called to deal with actual attempts at a European revolution. Witness
Marx's reaction to the revolutionary Commune of the Paris workers in
1871, Witness further Marx's and Engels' apparently inconsistent
positive attitude toward the entirely idealistic attempts of the
revolutionary Narodnaja Volja to enforce by terroristic action the
outbreak of "a political and thus also a social revolution" under the
backward conditions prevailing in the 70s and 80s in tsarist Russia. As
shown in detail in an earlier article (Living Marxism, March 1938),
Marx and Engels were not only prepared to regard the approaching
revolutionary outbreak in Russia as a signal for a general European
revolution of the Jacobin type in which (as Engels told Vera Sassulitch
in 1883) “if the year 1789 once comes, the year 1793 will
follow.” They actually hailed the Russian and all-European
revolution as a workers revolution and the starting point of a
Communistic development.

There is then no point in the objection raised by the,
Mensheviks
and other schools of the traditional Western type of Marxist orthodoxy
that the Marxism of Lenin was in fact only the return to an earlier
form of the Marxism of Marx which later had been replaced by a more
mature and materialistic form. It is quite true that the very
similarity between the historical situation arising in Russia in the
beginning of the twentieth century and the conditions prevailing in
Germany, Austria, and elsewhere at the eve of the European revolution
of 1848 explains the otherwise unexplainable fact that the latest phase
of the revolutionary movement of our time could have been represented
at all under the paradoxical form of an ideological return to the past.
Nevertheless, as shown above revolutionary Marxism as "restored" by
Lenin did conform, in its purely theoretical contents, much more with
the true spirit of all historical phases of the Marxian doctrine than
that Social Democratic Marxism of the preceding period which after all,
in spite of its loudly professed "orthodoxy," had never been more than
a mutilated and travestied form of the Marxian theory, vulgarizing its
real contents, and blunting its revolutionary edge. It is for this very
reason that Lenin's experiment in the "restoration" of revolutionary
Marxism confirmed most convincingly the utter futility of any attempt
to draw the theory of the revolutionary action of the working class not
from its own contents but from any "myth." It has shown, above all, the
ideological perversity of the idea to supplant the existing
deficiencies of the present action by an imaginary return to a
mythicized past. While such awakening of a dead revolutionary ideology
may possibly help for a certain time, as the Russian revolution has
shown, to conceal from the makers of the revolutionary "October" the
historical limitations of their heroic efforts, it is bound to result
ultimately not in finding once more the spirit of that earlier
revolutionary movement but only in making its ghost walk again. It has
resulted, in our time, in a new and "revolutionary Marxist" form of the
suppression and exploitation of the proletarian class in Soviet Russia,
and in an equally new and "revolutionary Marxist" form of crushing
genuine revolutionary movements in Spain and all over the world.

All this shows clearly that Marxism today could only be
"restored"
in its original form by its transformation into a mere ideology serving
an altogether different purpose and, indeed, a whole scale of changing
political purposes. It serves, at this very moment as an ideological
screen for the debunking of the hitherto predominant role of the ruling
party itself and for the further enhancement of the quasi-fascist
personal leadership of Stalin and of his all-adaptable agencies. At the
same time, on the international scene, the so-called anti-fascist
policy of the "Marxist" Comintern has come to play in the present
struggles between the various alliances of capitalist powers exactly
the same role as its opposite, the "anticommunist" and "anti-Marxist"
international policy of the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and the
Japanese warlords.

It should be understood that the whole criticism raised above
concerns only the ideological endeavours of the last fifty years to
"preserve" or to "restore," for immediate application, a thoroughly
mythicized "revolutionary Marxist doctrine." Nothing in this article is
directed against the scientific results reached by Marx and Engels and
a few of their followers on various fields of social research which in
many ways hold good to this day. Above all, nothing in this article is
directed against what may be called, in a very comprehensive sense, the
Marxist, that is, the independent revolutionary movement of the
international working class. There seems to be good reason, in the
search for what is living or may be recalled to life in the present
deathly standstill of the revolutionary workers' movement, to "return"
to that practical and not merely ideological broadmindedness by which
the first Marxist (at the same time Proudhonst, Blanquist, Bakuninist,
trade-unionist, etc.) International Working Men's Association welcomed
into its ranks all workers who subscribed to the principle of an
independent proletarian class struggle. As enunciated in the first of
its rules, drawn up by Marx, "the emancipation of the working classes
must be conquered by the working classes themselves."